


Going Viral

by Dissatisfied_With_The_Ending



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-07
Updated: 2019-12-07
Packaged: 2021-02-26 22:47:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,875
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21706771
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dissatisfied_With_The_Ending/pseuds/Dissatisfied_With_The_Ending
Summary: Based on an idea from a fellow Redditor on the Magnus Archives subreddit.  Featuring the Corruption making the leap into the 21st century.Reddit post here: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMagnusArchives/comments/e7acmo/cyber_corruption/
Comments: 11
Kudos: 28





	Going Viral

“Statement of Doctor Kassie O. Long regarding her experimental self-augmentations. Original statement given September 25, 2019. Audio recording by Jonathan Sims, The Archivist.

Statement begins.

I’ve always loved technology, ever since I was a kid. I used to watch Star Trek, and I remember thinking how wonderful it would be to live in that world. You remember the Borg? Well rather than hating them or being scared of them, I was fascinated.

I loathed the hive mind aspect of them, mind you. But the idea of improving yourself by integrating technology into your body, well, I always thought that part was great. I mean, how often do you just … forget something? Or you’ve got something you need to figure out, a math problem, trying to make ends meet and the finances just aren’t adding up. Wouldn’t it be great if your memory were perfect? If you had the speed and accuracy of a calculator? I used to wonder, what if I could hold an entire spreadsheet, hundreds or thousands of data points in my mind all at once?

I thought it would be incredible. Do you know what a singularity is? I won’t get into the details of it, but basically it’s the idea technology will begin to advance at such a rate that humanity won’t be able to keep up. I remember the first time I read about it and thinking of the Borg. I thought, ‘We can’t fall behind if technology becomes part of us.’

Anyway, the idea of augmentation stuck in my mind. Giving yourself a perfect memory. Improving your eyes so you can see for miles and stream the pictures to your TV at home. All those silly sci-fi dreams like the Matrix and androids and cyborgs. Then I got older and did more research and I got to college. I started working seriously on making it happen.

Technology loved me back it seemed. My computer science classes were a breeze, and I was very much the teacher’s pet in my robotics courses. And programming. I wish I knew half as many human languages as I do programming languages. High level, low level, the whole nine.

When it came time for my doctorate, I started working on devices to help the disabled better interface with machines. So many people don’t have the dexterity to use a keyboard, or even a mouse very well. And those people have such a hard time in today’s world. The need was there. And the funding. So I set to work, developing the hardware, putting the team together, finding volunteers. I’m sure you know about all that.

We developed all sorts of things. The first devices were for amputees. All non-invasive. We created prosthetics that would ‘listen’ for nerve impulses and then move accordingly. It took more PT than a usual prosthetic of course. And was much more expensive. But it worked! God, I remember the first time a volunteer stood on one of our legs. We were both crying. She said, ‘I can almost feel it, the way I don’t have to just drag it around. It moves! Thank you, thank you, thank you!’

Of course, that wasn’t enough for me. She could talk to the leg, but the leg couldn’t talk back. That’s where I really wanted to get. We tried a lot of things, trying to avoid anything invasive. After all, when you break the skin, there’s the risk of infection. It’s almost never worth it. We tried some stuff with induction but we couldn’t get it right. Subjects could feel something. But it always seemed to be either static, you know, pins and needles. Or just pain. I remember one volunteer asked me, ‘I get enough of that without the arm, why would I want more with it?’

The human body just wasn’t good at listening to the weak signals we needed to use. So my team and I debated for a long time. Ultimately, we decided to try implanted receivers. Basically, a bridge between the nerves and the prosthetic. Implanted under the skin, once it was healed, the prosthetic could send signals to the receiver, which was much better at listening for tiny signals than human nerves. Then the receiver would give the nerve a signal it could use. And that worked.

It was some really incredible engineering we did on that project. Pressure sensors and heat sensors and all kinds of other things integrated into the ‘skin’ of the prosthetic so that people could ‘feel’ their limb again. I thought I had cried before; it was nothing compared to the first time a volunteer wrapped their new hand around a coffee cup and told me they could feel the heat, or the half second later when they snatched it back. I got my doctorate on that research.

So there I am, Dr. Long at last and I’m wondering where I should go with it next. I turn on the TV and there’s Star Trek and the Borg and I remember what I really wanted. Building the prosthetics was amazing, don’t get me wrong. But it was a steppingstone. My real ambitions were something else. But that was the problem too. Helping the disabled, building new prosthetics, university donors loved that.

It was much harder to convince people to fund the project of, 'I want to make the human mind better, imagine a perfect memory...' So on and so forth. Volunteers didn’t want too much to do with it either. Not once they knew what was involved. Poke and prod and cut at the stump where a limb used to be? Well, they were used to that. Open up their skull and poke at their brain though? I might as well have been Frankenstein at that point.

The university told me, very politely of course, that while they would be happy to work with me on projects similar to what I’d already done, that my new ambitions were… how did they put it? ‘Not in line with the university’s image or moral standards.’ That hit pretty hard I don’t mind telling you. I’d been expecting it, but still. You hope. You think, ‘I’ve done so much for you already, do this for me.’ But the world doesn’t work that way.

In the end, I found myself talking to corporations instead. More money there. And fewer scruples. It felt dirty. Science in the service of profit instead of humanity. But I reasoned that if I could get my devices working, everyone would benefit anyway. I had an anarchist streak in me in those days too, so I figured I could always just publish the designs online later if whatever company took me put any unreasonable restrictions on my work.

Even in the corporate world, people weren’t really leaping to embrace my vision. Too forward-thinking I guess. Or maybe they’d seen Star Trek too and were afraid of the Borg’s integration with technology rather than envious. Either way it took some time to find a company that would support my work. I ended up at a fairly well-known firm with a bit of a dodgy record that I won’t name for obvious reasons. I’ll just say they’ve got a fairly biblical name and leave it at that.

Anyway, they gave me much freer rein than I’d have thought. It boiled down to if I could make my devices work the way I’d described; they’d be happy to fund me. So I went to work.

There’d been some early work done years and years ago on brain-machine interfaces. Things like making a computer mouse move with your thoughts. So that’s where I started. I made up this terribly impractical little thing that could learn to read your thoughts and use them to control a computer. Basically, you would learn to think about a program you wanted to open in a way the device could understand, then it would transmit your commands to the computer and away you’d go. It was only a half-step from the previous work in the field. Though my financiers were pleased with it anyway.

The trouble with what I wanted to do was getting information back to the user. You see, with those other devices, the one that controlled a mouse, and later mine that could control the whole computer, the user still needs their eyes to get information back to them. And that works fine if you’re just wanting a hands-free, but otherwise conventional, experience. But it’s slow. It’s not the way computers communicate with each other, whole mountains of data in a few seconds. A person might take minutes to read a few pages of information that a computer would process faster than you could blink. That’s what I wanted.

So my problem wasn’t figuring out how to get information from the person to the computer. It was the massively more difficult task of getting information from the computer to the person, without any of the senses we were used to.

Still, there’d been some research into that field as well. It took a long time. Years upon years. I won’t bore you with the details of the countless theories, experiments, revisions and all the slog of taking a device from a concept to a working piece of machinery. The important part is that it worked. It wasn’t pretty. The surgery required for the implantation meant that our volunteers ended up bald with a network of scars all over their skulls. God knows what they told their families. But eventually we figured out how to get information passed back to the brain. From there it was easy. The day we knew we’d succeeded we had one of our volunteers sitting in a room with no phone, no machinery or computer. Just themselves. And we told them to tell us when we’d sent something to them.

They got it right every time. It was just a ping, just us asking them to signal that they were receiving. But it was momentous all the same. Then a few months later we were ready to send more complicated information. It started with a simple document; we would send it and they would tell us what it contained. We got that working too and we knew that we were sitting on a revolutionary piece of technology. The various implants were responsible both for receiving information, processing it into a form the brain could use, and then storing parts of it in conjunction with the brain. When it was all together, we went to the company and told them about it.

I don’t know how they kept their composure as well as they did but you could tell they were dreaming of the kind of money this could bring in. Maybe what kept them together was knowing what a pain the regulatory side of it would be. I had worked with the government before, getting my devices approved, you know? I figured it wouldn’t be such a problem with this. Sure it was different, the goal was different, the procedures. The technology was… even to call it bleeding edge is an understatement.

The MHRA was… less than thrilled by our work. They told us in so many words that our work would never see the light of day. My old contacts at the Agency let me know when I asked that the incredibly rigorous hoops the MHRA had asked us to jump through for approval were a formality. Even if we met them, our application would still be denied. Some people from the BAF had got wind of our project, reviewed it, and told the MHRA that under no circumstances should they approve it. It was like something out of a bad movie. Almost a decade of work and it looked like I was further from my dream than ever.

To say I was devastated would only scratch the surface. This was my life’s work. My driving force, my everything. I’d eschewed anything but work friendships, any time for romance or a normal life, all for my work. I was in a really dark place there for a while, and to put it bluntly, I’d kind of lost my will to live. That’s probably why the idea came to me to experiment on myself. After all, if I couldn’t share my work with others, at least I could make use of it. And if something went wrong, I didn’t wake up from surgery for instance, then… Oh well.

It took some doing to convince the surgeon to perform the operation. Almost a year in fact. But I managed eventually, and I used the time well; equipping my home with the various tools and systems to make good use of my new tech. And so, just about a year and a half after our initial application was rejected, I shaved my head and woke up the next morning with a pattern of cuts and stitching decorating my skull. It itched terribly.

I knew it would; the volunteers had mentioned it. But the reality of it was so much more maddening than the imagination. You can’t scratch at it of course. Because where there used to be skull now there’s just a hole waiting for something to fall in. I wonder if the MHRA would have approved the project even if the BAF hadn’t stepped in sometimes. Looking back, thinking how terrified I was of something puncturing that thin membrane separating my grey matter from the rest of the world, I’m inclined to think not.

But it doesn’t matter. The operation was a success. I knew it as soon as I woke up. I could… not hear them but… I could sense all the computers in the place, the hospital. It was like being in a room full of people speaking another language. You can tell they’re talking and it’s not just gibberish. But it’s not something you understand either.

Not so when I got home. All my home computers had the software to speak a language I understood, to translate from their native OS to something my implants could use. Have you ever had your dearest dream come true? I can’t describe it, the joy I felt when I walked into my living room, thought for a light to turn on, and had it obey. That’s something so simple isn’t it? Turning on a light. Any idiot with a finger can do that. But I could do it with a thought now. And more than that. I’d had a year to integrate all the hardware and software into my home and I could feel all of it now, talking to each other, to me, waiting for me to put it to work.

That was fun. That was something the average Joe could understand and appreciate even if it seems like a damn fool way to achieve it. But my ambitions had always been for the kind of thing you see in robot movies. Some machine pulling vast quantities of information from thin air even as you’re asking your question. And I could do it now.

Suddenly if I wanted to know anything from one of my files, for instance the exact latency of one of the transmitters for my old prosthetics from a particular round of tests we’d done, I could pull it out of memory like nothing. I could do it a thousand times. There were so many possibilities for what I could do now. I wrote more software in those few weeks than I’d ever written in my life before. I truthfully think those were the happiest weeks I'll ever know.

So, of course, everything had to come crashing down. I was checking my e-mail one morning, when one of the subject lines jumped out at me. ‘I LOVE YOU’ in all caps. I snorted into my coffee; it was like something out of the early 2000’s. I didn’t open it of course. Just sent it to my spam folder and went on my merry way.

Later the same day I was going through some data. I’d been working on a program, an operating system more like, that wouldn’t require a filter between me and the computer. Something built to speak the same ‘language’ that I was using. I opened up one of the files I was working on and where there should have been thousands of lines of code there was just one. ‘I LOVE YOU’. Now that was terrifying. The last thing you want to find out after you’ve connected your brain to a computer is that the computer has a virus.

I killed the internet connection to the house and disconnected all my computers from the home network. Both the ethernet connections, and any wireless connections, and spent the rest of the day trying to find out what was going on. All my virus scans turned up nothing. The file I’d pulled up earlier showed it hadn’t been edited since I’d saved it the night before. I decided just to be on the safe side that I would wipe that hard drive completely and work from a backup copy. Better to lose a day’s worth of work than risk an infection throughout my network.

I got the backup copied over to my working drive and booted up the computer again, ready to try and makeup some lost time. But when the system came up my stomach dropped like a rock. There was nothing there. No icons, not even a desktop really. Just the words, ‘I LOVE YOU’ in white on a black background. That meant that the backup drive had been compromised as well. I went to dig around in it and see what, if anything, was salvageable. But when I went to open it up the drive had been renamed. It used to be just a generic ‘BACKUP 1’. Now it was named ‘I LOVE YOU’.

I don’t know what I expected to find when I opened it. Everything looked normal at first. The drive had been renamed, but all my files were in the right places, the right file sizes and save dates. But every single file, when I opened it up, just contained a wall of text. Like The Shining, only instead it was just ‘I LOVE YOU’ over and over and over. I was feeling quite sick by that time. I didn’t know how someone had gotten into my system. Or why. I still wasn’t even sure what they’d done except that a lot of my work was apparently gone.

It was well past midnight by this point, so I decided to call it a night. I went to bed and when I finally got to sleep the dreams were… strange. The only one I can remember clearly had me walking on some unfamiliar landscape. It was flat. So flat, not flat like a plain is flat. There you’ve got the curvature of the Earth and a limit to how far you can see. This was proper flat and I could see forever. Literally.

I was on some hard, green surface and as I walked, I would come across these bright, orange lines. It took me some time in the dream world to realize what it was. I was walking across a circuit board. But it wasn’t one like I’d ever seen before. Everywhere were these large, round holes. A lot of boards will have them before parts have been soldered to them, but these holes weren’t for chips. The placement was wrong. A microchip is almost always just a rectangle. These holes were placed more organically.

I stopped on the edge of one and peered down into it. There was no bottom that I could see. I called into it, just like every kid you see in a movie, staring into the abyss: ‘Hello!’. Unlike in the movies though, I got a response. A great buzzing filled the air, like bees. It was the song of a hive, and its members came out to greet me. They were enormous. Their lighter bands were, for want of a better descriptor, electric blue, and their darker stripes were the color of the copper in an old circuit board.

The hive rose up about me like a storm and two among them came and grabbed me and bore me up like it was nothing. We rose, higher and higher until, looking down, I could see the honeycomb pattern of the hive’s many entrances. And there below, glowing in the shadows beneath the circuit board was a brain. I don’t know how, but I knew it was mine. Where the implants touched my brain there were lines stretching away, following the contours of the organ and stretching down into the valleys between. Like fingers. I heard the words, ‘I love you’, though I couldn’t say from where, and then I awoke.

I’ve been able to hear the buzzing of the hive ever since. Sometimes low and soft, sometimes high and intrusive. It’s been a steady roar ever since I came here, oppressive and furious.

I went to the hospital that next morning on a hunch. They took an x-ray and sure enough, all through my head were little lines leading away from the contact points of my implants. The doctor said they looked like metal. I just nodded. As he said it, his computer winked out behind him. I saw it and pointed. He blinked at me confused for a moment and he told me at first to ignore it. But I insisted. I had to know if the mounting dread churning in my gut was for good reason.

When the screen came back up, there was nothing except the words in white, ‘I LOVE YOU’ on a field of black. The darkness of the screen was uniform, but I could swear, hidden in the black recesses was a network of holes. I thanked the doctor then and apologized, though I didn’t bother to explain why when he asked.

Since then, every piece of tech I’ve been near has gone the same way. Off. Reboot. ‘I LOVE YOU’. So I apologize in advance. Your institute may need some new computers soon.

Whatever was happening inside my brain is spreading too. The girl at the front desk saw it. There are lines tracing my skin now, a loose honeycomb of darkness spreading out from my nerves, down from my brain. I could see the fear in her eyes.

I don’t know what’s happening to me. My thoughts haven’t really changed, except I’ve gotten used to the buzzing. It was annoying that first day. I thought I’d go mad. But now, the song is sweet. Comforting even. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. The hive loves me after all.

My skin itches where those dark lines have spread. Sometimes I could swear I feel movement tracing down them, from the implants, down my spine and along my nerves. I don’t know if that’s real or just my imagination. My fear.

I guess that’s all. I don’t know what you’ll do with my statement, or even why I thought to come here really. But there you have it. Sorry again. About the computers. And your phones. I love you.

Statement ends.”


End file.
